Nick,
Recall that the "Kitchen Group" at Clark University put together a book on
"Recursively" in psychology. I contributed a chapter on William James's
Radical Empiricism and the befuddling notion of "pure experience". In it,
I illustrate how this "radical" approach to psychology is largely just a
dog headed application and reapplication of first-principles reasoning (a
thing is what you experience when you experience that thing). The
following section is relevant, I think, to the discussion you want to have
about how to deal with dreams:
........I will start with a quick episode, presented as a standard,
first-person narrative. Next I will analyze the story from both a
traditional perspective and a radical empiricist perspective. The
traditional perspective will take dualism for granted, as well as the
rightness or wrongness of any judgment about the world. The radical
empiricist perspective will simply examine the experiences themselves.
*The Episode*
It is dark, but I slowly become able to make out a form. It is a man. I
call out, but get no reply. I approach, and squint. It is not a man, it is
statue, a very good statue, maybe wax. I thought I saw a man, but I was
wrong, it was only a man in my mind, the statue is real. Wait, now my eyes
are opening again. It was all a dream. There was never anything there at
all.
*Traditional Dualistic Translation*
This story is about a person doubly tricked. At first they
think they are seeing a man, then that is replaced by thinking they are
seeing a statue. In fact, there never was any such form anywhere.
Everything that supposedly ‘happened’ was merely in their head. Mid-dream,
they were correct in asserting there was no man, but wrong in asserting
there was a statue. They are correct only at the end, when they judge both
objects to have never existed.
*Radical Empiricist Translation*
This story is about a person’s transforming experiences. The form is
experienced first as not having a clear shape, but then quickly comes to be
distinguished as a man. Then the form is experienced as a statue. After the
form is experienced as a statue, the original experience is re-experienced
as wrong. After it is experienced as wrong, it is also experienced as
having been mental. Then the person experiences all of those happenings as
‘mental’ and the room he finds himself in as real. More specifically, the
prior things are re-experienced as having been ‘dreamt’ *and* as having
been ‘mental’, whereas the current surroundings are experienced as
physical.
*Elaboration of Radical Empiricist Translation*
There are crucial differences between the radical empiricist translation
and the traditional translation that are easy to miss. To highlight but a
few: 1) In the traditional translation, the original experience of the man
is declared to have been purely mental. In the radical empiricist
translation, it is emphasized that no such distinction originally existed –
there was nothing about the original experience to suggest that it was
‘wrong’ or ‘mental.’ Those are aspects of new experiences, not the original
experiences. 2) In the traditional translation, there is no *thing* being
experienced. Part of what the dualist asserts by declaring something to be
‘mental’ is that it is ‘not real.’ Even were we to somehow force the
dualist to accept the dreamt form as “a thing”, they would still insist
that the experienced man was distinct from the experienced statue, i.e.,
that there was one some-thing originally and a different some-thing later.
The radical empiricist, on the other hand accepts both the experienced form
as a thing, and as the same thing despite the transformation. It is
necessary to refer to the form as a stable thing, because a stable
‘sameness’ was part of the dreamer’s experience. 3) In the traditional
translation, once everything is revealed to be a dream, this retroactively
dictates our treatment of the original experiences as composed of ‘dream
stuff’ (be it ideas, misfiring neurons, illusion, or some other substance).
In the radical empiricist translation, we stay true to the obvious fact
that such is a *post hoc* judgment. Unless the original experience was
somehow ‘dreamy’ as, for example in the case of a lucid dream, it is a
gross violation to treat the original experience as somehow having been of
‘dream stuff’. The *last* experience is of the previous experiences *as*
dreams, i.e., the last experience only.
To focus on the final point: If we want to understand the difference
between ‘dream’ and ‘real’ we need to look at the difference between the
original experience (of the statue as ‘real statue’) and the last
experience (of the statue as ‘dream statue’). Whatever is different between
those two concrete experiences is the meaning of ‘dream’. It does no good
to simply declare that the *first* experience was of ‘dream statue’; in
fact, to do so completely undercuts our ability to investigate the
phenomenon of interest.
The radical empiricist stays true to experiences in ways that the
traditional approach does not. The original experience was *not* of a ‘real
statue’ nor of a ‘dream statue,’ but merely of ‘statue.’ In this sense, the
original experience was neutral with respect to that distinction (see
Dewey, 1917). As we found in our multi-philosopher discussion above, we
again find that all categories are *post hoc*, in that they are part of a
later re-experience. However, and here is the recursion, those later
re-experiences are also themselves experiences. Thus, the re-experience
must be subjected to the same analysis as the original experience. The
categories revealed in our re-experience are themselves first-order members
of the particular experience in which they are found. No amount of
compounding experiences can escape this. It is not that we are getting
nowhere with our thinking, re-thinking, or meta-thinking, it is only that
wherever we get, we are still within the realm of pure experience.
-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<[email protected]>
On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 4:57 PM, Nick Thompson <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi, Lee,
>
> I would like to get this thread on dream memory going again.
>
> You state the issue precisely. It goes back to a friendly argument that
> has been going on for years, and about which we tease one another, from
> time
> to time. Frank firmly believes in "privileged access" [Frank, please
> correct any of this I have wrong.] So, my tease was, to a person who
> believes in privileged access, how does one memory of a dream come to be
> the
> standard against which the other is judged. You are quite right that on a
> Peircean view, all experiences are "now", but some come with a "This is a
> memory" sign attached to them. So then, the question is, how do we come to
> categorize some of our experiences as memories, or as dreams, or as
> memories
> of dream.
>
> Good to hear from you Lee,
>
> Nick
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2016 7:24 AM
> To: Frank Wimberly <[email protected]>; The Friday Morning Applied
> Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>; Nick Thompson
> <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unix Nightmare
>
> Frank writes:
>
> > Nick,
> >
> > Well, sometimes when I'm thinking about a dream, I suddenly remember
> > some detail that I had completely forgotten. But more often I fall
> > back to sleep. In my old age, I seldom remember dreams.
>
> in reply to Nick:
>
> > > Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory
> > > of a dream not be accurate?!
>
> I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly
> believed by *me*) that one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or
> an error of attribution?) if one thinks of "a dream" as some thing that
> existed--or some act that was undertaken--before one awakes, which can
> thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names
> "remembering the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of
> two
> behaviors--"dreaming while half-awake" and "attributing the quality of
> 'rememberance of the past' to 'awareness of an on- going behavior'" (pardon
> the awkward phrasings). Of course, often one also "thinks about a dream"
> when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may be
> (or
> incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type.
>
>
> In particular, to say that "I suddenly remember some detail that I had
> completely forgotten"
> *may* be begging the question: how can you know (and why should you
> suppose)
> that you are not simply (sic!) creating that detail anew, and
> simultaneously
> attributing pastness (and
> veridicality) to it? And I do mean to ask, literally, *how* can you know
> something like that?
>
> On an account like mine, Nick's question becomes vacuous; but maybe Nick
> phrased the question exactly as a succinct way of stating my more rambling
> account.
>
> Lee
>
>
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